Who You Calling A Jesse?

Another TODCon has come and gone in a haze of mojitos, great food, and great company. This year it was back in Orlando—my favorite place for it even though it was really hot and humid, I am getting bored with Las Vegas. This year had an amazing line-up of presentations which had little to do with ‘Adobe stuff’ and more to do with developing rich experiences on the web using whatever tools you use. Sure there was some from folks from Adobe showing off some things in CS4. Greg Rewis from Adobe gave a sneak peek of Flash CS4, there was a demo of Fireworks CS4 from Alan Musselman, and some discussion on Dreamweaver CS4.

Really looking forward to next years conference already as I think there are some changes afoot that will make it an even better community focused conference.

My two presentations were on AJAX strategy and Web Project Management. I have stuck both sets of slides up on slideshare but I don’t think they make much sense without the whole presentation ;)

Adobe has made available a public beta of the next version of Dreamweaver. Go give it a try! Scott Fegette has a bit more about the release on his blog.

It is really good to see Adobe do this after they let Photoshop CS3 out in beta last year. The next version of Dreamweaver is a big improvement over CS3 for front end developers although I would like to have seen a bit more for application developers.

January first is upon us and after what was a hectic Christmas break I can sit down and reflect on the year that was 2007 and what might come technology wise for 2008. All this happened in my life:

• I became a Dad on January 19th
• finished my course load on my Msc
• changed jobs
• cities I visited outside of Ontario: Las Vegas, London, Cambridge, Oxford, Leeds, Harrogate, York, Liverpool, Wigan, Deddington, Buffalo, Quebec City, Montreal
• Drove 30 000 km (or so) and I live 2 km from work
• instigated 4 BarCampWaterloo’s and one StartupCampWaterloo meeting a load of really interesting people at all of them

…and that is what I remember. Last year I set some goals for myself and had a few comments on technology. If I wouldn’t have changed jobs all those could have been met (I think) but I didn’t foresee that I have an opportunity to work with an extremely talented team on an impossible project with technology I hadn’t ever worked with. That fuels my excitement for 2008.

For this year my goals are just as simple as last year:

• Finish my msc (I have to by April)
• Focus on user experience and UI development
• Spend every moment possible with my son

As far as web technology goes. I thought last year that Spry sucked and AJAX might be more accessible by year end. I think as the year went on Spry got better and folks like Derek figured out some best practices for more accessible AJAX experiences.

This year I think the big technology fight will be between Flash and Silverlight. Microsoft has to figure out how to convince Flash developers why they should forget all they have learned and change technology while Adobe needs to figure out how not to step in it and be seen as an arrogant company that doesn’t deserve the loyalty Macromedia had built. The buzz and reaction over the whole user tracking thing or updates is going to piss people off. How dare customers get upset? Indeed.

Microsoft’s UI with Silverlight trump card might be Sharepoint. This beast of a CMS is (I think) the most extensive and customizable business class CMS out there. It is the best of a really bad bunch and Silverlight could make it suck less from a UI perspective. We shall see.

Should be an interesting year ;)

There has been a pretty interesting flame war that has erupted over a posting by Jeff Croft entitled What’s not to love about CSS frameworks? It seems like it has been quite a while since a good flame over web standards and best practices has played out. The tone of the post likely has really fueled the war but the topic itself seems to truly polarize some in the web standards community. Why is that? The devil is likely in the definition and I see it as the less formal art world colliding with the engineering world (something that has been slowly happening for a while with web development I believe).

Jeff Croft posted some follow ups: A follow up on CSS frameworks and The final word on frameworks, from someone way smarter than me. Andy Clarke interjected a comical What’s not to love about instant cake mixes in between that offered some satirical insight. The comments on the posts are shocking in some ways but once the definitions were clarified I think it comes down to artistic approaches meeting formal engineering process.

If you agree a framework is just a collection of reusable code that offers enough abstraction that you could apply it to whatever project you are working on then you have probably some engineering exposure ;) Reusing things is common practice, if you have a problem with that then you are just plain dumb with your time. This reuse of code features is part of what makes Dreamweaver CS3 such a good tool for rapid development. The CSS templates that come with it offer a powerful ‘framework’ to start with. Would you consider that a framework? I dunno. The ‘CSS Framework’ proper that is implied (blueprintCSS ) is in fact a more extensive framework that tries to solve more problems.

I think frameworks are great. I am building one now along with my GUI team of co-op students for a new system here. We are using a more formal engineering process to approach it but what we are essentially doing is creating a framework of GUI elements along with their HTML and JavaScript. Love them or hate them frameworks are just another thing the web dev world ‘re-invented’ from the software engineering world.

I can’t believe this but apparently if you are working some PHP or ASP files that have some HTML in them Dreamweaver CS3 is not going to like you. Adobe has a Tech Note on the issue and it only effects Windows users with CS3. I simply can’t imagine why that would do anything… but if you are swearing at Dreamweaver CS3 crashing after the time change, this is why.

Adobe announcement of an announcement today is the big unveiling of their CS3 product line. Since Photoshop CS3 beta appeared in December there has been a lot of talk about the changes in the Adobe line but my thing is the Creative Suite CS3 Web Edition. More specifically I am interested in Dreamweaver CS3 and Contribute CS3.

I have been using both on campus here for a while and I can say they are both very nice upgrades from the previous versions. Adobe highlights the features of Spry integration for Dreamweaver but I have to say the new CSS based layouts that come with it are going to be the #1 hit. The templates are just basic layouts that offer a designer/developer a sound starting point to build a web site. The code is just amazingly simple and full of comments so you can easily understand what is going on. It is sorta what the campus CLF here was supposed to be but with no real style just straight structure.

That is not to say the Spry features aren’t cool either. Adobe has come a long way since last May with Spry and I think Spry integration will offer a lot of people a stepping stone into the tricky world of DOM scripting and AJAX. Spry stuff should be used wisely mind you ;) I am a bit worried that people might use it and not think about accessibility or usability but time will tell.

Contribute on the other hand… Version 4 was released what feels like just last month. This new version is a CS3 release and like all the other products is a universal binary for mac users. That along with the updated CS3 branding, blogging, integration with FLV, IE 7, Firefox, rendering improvements, and some other general clean up make the latest version of Contribute a lot more attractive to update from version 3.

I am really excited about these updated tools. It should be interesting to hear what other people think once the try copies are available for download (no idea when that will be).

I was asleep at my RSS when I noticed Macworld has it from Adobe that CS3 will be available announced March 27th. This is pretty cool. For Mac users the added bonus is the promise of big speed improvements on your x86 machines. Looking forward to having some updated tools around…

Update: Adobe says it is just announcing it, it will be available in the spring sometime. Tsk Macworld for getting me excited.

A new version of Spry has appeared on Adobe labs along with some updates posted in their forum. Two things catch my attention on the forum post:

1. Switched to using namespaced attributes. Attributes are now of the form spry:. The Spry namespace is defined by adding the the following attribute to the HTML tag of the document: xmlns:spry=”http://ns.adobe.com/spry”.
2. Added support for the new spry:content attribute, which allows the replacement of static content with dynamic content when JavaScript is enabled. This allows pages to work in a non scripting environment.

The first one is a workaround to the creative XHTML being used (and techincally is allowed, part of the point of *extensible bit of XHTML over HTML, is it necessary for AJAX is another post altogether) but the second is perhaps a way to address accessibility. Hopefully I will have some time to play with it in the next few days. I will definiately be watching the forum to see what people get up to with it.

A little gem in there is an example of progressive enhancement in spry/samples/products-hijax/ – take a look at that! Now that is step in the right direction. If you turn your js off it still works but the data isn’t dynamic either. I suppose you could achieve the same functionality with a php version pulling from a database.

Of interest to me is that although I know it is a messy way of doing AJAX compared to protoype.js, it keeps improving. Which is a good sign but I do hope to see some better behaviour in the XHTML ;) Download the latest and give them some feedback! Oh and if anyone around here has tried out Spry, leave a message.

This afternoon I will be presenting with Pat Lafranier of IST at OUCC in Guelph. The presentation is available as a PDF in my documentation section. The real short version: we are talking about the last year or so with Contribute on campus with the new web standards friendly Common Look and Feel. If you want to check out what we are talking about, take a look at the presentation slides. If you have attended the presentation post your questions/comments below.

Maybe you haven’t heard of microformats or maybe you have but really haven’t had time to check them out? If you use Dreamweaver you are in luck, the Dreamweaver Task Force has released a microformats extension as a beta. So far it supports hCalendar, hCard, rel-license, rel-tag and XFN.

To put it in some UW perspective, the CLF is more of a macroformat as it lays out the larger structure div id’s for a site. That is why as it stands ‘out-of-the-box’ its a largely unfinished product but it does give you the skeleton to start your site with that works consistently with a given set of CSS files. Microformats are just smaller specialized skeletons that give you a set of id’s and classes that are semantically relevant and machine friendly. It is sort of like bringing in some of that XML goodness to XHTML without resorting to XSLT.

Why is this a good thing to have consistent formatting? Well if you wanted to parse the data (now or in the future) on your pages, it just got a lot easier to ensure you parse the correct data. You still need to add style and content (flesh) to microformats as you do with the UW macroformat – CLF.

Go give the microformats extension a try and take a look at the code, it might help you wrap your head around the technique.

There is an update for Dreamweaver 8 now available. It takes care of that relative link management issue and a few other bugs. Take a look at the release notes and grab the update. I have updated the post on the relative link management issue to reflect the fix in the update.

If you are using Dreamweaver templates (DWT) that have PHP extensions in Contribute you might have noticed something really annoying: Contribute 3 is not managing your links inside the PHP. I am not entirely sure the extent of the problem but where it really annoys me is with PHP includes. Say you have:

php include(”../includes/UWheader.html”);

In your DWT this makes perfect sense and Dreamweaver 8 and MX 2004 has no problem managing that. If you have a new file from template created in the parent directory you get:

php include(“includes/UWheader.html”);

But if you create a file in Contribute 3 from the DWT.php it doesn’t do anything. It just leaves the original path. What you are left with is a broken include. To work around you need to put the full path to your include in your template but then you have another problem with rendering when you drop this in your include:

php include(“http://yoursite.com/includes/UWheader.html”);

Dreamweaver 8 has no problem with this as it will render it for you but Contribute 3, well Contribute won’t render the includes in render mode (edit mode) either. Which is nuts considering it renders it fine in the browser mode.

Anyone else notice annoyances with Contribute 3 and PHP?

It seems Molly’s open letter to Disney Store UK started a real buzz around the web standards community about it means to be a web professional. There is certainly a good list of posts and a trail of comments on the topic so rather than try and summarize, here are three to start (you can find the others through these):

• Web Standards and The New Professionalism
• The New Amateurs
• A web professional can never stop learning

There are some good points brought up in those articles, particularly with regards to reaching out to the up and coming web folks with regards to web standards. I tend to agree with the thought that being a web professional means making an effort on your sites to move towards standards and accessible design. It doesn’t mean that your site has to be 100% standards compliant and accessible.

What I am wondering, do people even think there is such a thing as a web professional or do they think Dreamweaver will do it for them? The reason I ask is that I see many admin assistant jobs posted that require Dreamweaver experience and its not like an admin assistant doesn’t have enough to worry about in a day, why do they need to concern themselves with web development?

If its Contribute they need to learn, then that makes sense as it is designed for the amateur to maintain content. But Dreamweaver? Macromedia has made an excellent attempt at making Dreamweaver usable to the amateur but it can still be overwhelming for a new person to learn. If you are serious about the web Dreamweaver is the tool to get you into it, don’t get me wrong, but are tools like Dreamweaver hurting the perceived professionalism of web people?

The thinking of non-web folks appears to be a tool like Dreamweaver is all you need to publish a professional web site. It works doesn’t it? What is lacking though is the experience and the expertise to finish your site and do it properly. It’s a tool. If you buy a compound mitre saw are you a carpenter? Sure you can make cabinets but compare yours with a carpenters, which would you prefer to have in your kitchen while entertaining guests or trying to sell your house?

…and no this isn’t a gripe about anything in-particular. I think that people around here generally get that web work requires a certain level of expertise.